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Mysterious Malware Infiltrates Cambridge Hospital’s Network

A hospital in the UK shut down its network partly when an unidentified computer virus infected its network in the first week of June 2009.

According to reports, an unknown number of computer systems at Cambridge, UK-based Addenbrooke's Hospital were infected by this virus. A spokesman informed that the entire hospital was operating as usual when the IT staff officials came across the virus infection. He highlighted the fact that none of the patients has been affected by this incident and that the entire matter was resolved within a couple of hours.

At first, the experts were called to sanitize the affected machines in the hospital's clinical areas while the others were dealt later. The computer system has returned to its normal operation. The spokesman for the hospital stated that instant step was adopted by the IT staff and the hospital kept on operating as usual.

The spokesman, however, said that the impact of malware infection was not much severe at the Cambridge hospital. He stated that they will ask the experts about the malware that lead to the infection in the hospital's computers as the information about that malware was not available at that moment.

It is learnt that the computers in both clinical and non-clinical departments got infected due to the malware. This means that the hospital staff was not able to access some of the important information during that time.

In certain cases, the virus forced the employees in the clinical department to go back to the pen and paper system while the ambulances were diverted temporarily on the very first day the incident took place.

Meanwhile, the incident of hospitals in the UK suffering from malware infections is not at all new. Just recently, in May 2009, the systems at a Tameside Hospital fell for the virus infection. According to security experts, it was the work of Conficker worm which infected the systems at the hospital's IT department; as a result, people working in different departments of the hospital failed to access some of the crucial data needed to perform their job.

However, such incidents are very easy to avoid. By allowing the Windows' automatic updates and installing up-to-date anti-virus solution, computers can be protected from the deadly virus.